Killer applications for Solid State Storage

A solid state drive (SSD) is a semiconductor-based block storage device that behaves as a virtual HDD and appears to the host device as a disk drive. This analysis points out killer applications for solid state storage.

There are three types of solid state storage systems:

1. DDR memory based
- Same memory used in enterprise servers
- Requires batteries and backup hard disks for non-volatility
- Best known for outstanding performance and high cost
2. Cashed Flash based memory:
- Mix of DDR RAM and NAND Flash
3. Flash memory based
- Same class of memory used in consumer electronics
- Inherently non-volatile
- Best known for ruggedness and good random read performance

Killer applications for DDR RAM SSD:
1. Write intensive Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) environments
- Heavy writes make these environments unsuitable for flash systems
- Store transaction logs, temporary space, and undo segments on SSD
2. Web transaction databases
- Extreme concurrency
- High read and write volumes
3. Single-threaded applications
- The ultimate latency sensitive application
- Often found in the financial industry
4. Mission critical data warehousing:
- When company profitability or lives are on the line, nothing is faster than a DDR RAM

based solution
- Data Warehouses with simultaneous high ingest rates and high query rates

Killer applications for Cashed Flash SSD:
1. Data warehousing
- Terabytes of capacity needed as hot files are difficult to isolate to a small amount of

data
- Very read intensive applications
Cash will preserve write performance at levels the enterprise is accustomed to receiving
2. Rendering
- Small block random I/O application
- Very read intensive application
- Hot files are difficult to isolate
3. Video on demand
- Storing frequently accessed movies requires 1TB plus capacity
- Very read intensive applications
- Less frequently accessed content still stored in HDD RAID
4. Seismic processing
- Large capacity of data (4TB plus), broadly and randomly accessed
- Very read intensive application

Killer application for Flash SSD is business notebook computer storage with following features:
- Faster OS startup
- Improved notebook read performance
- Low power
- Rugged

Notebooks, servers and other systems are among the potential high-volume markets for SSDs, but cost has been a major stumbling block. Hard drives remain cheaper and more reliable. However, the ultra mobile PC, netbook and related sub-notebook segments could become a big driver for SSDs. In this segment, the SSD market could hit 33 million units by 2012.